It'd be interesting to know what those reasons are - I'm still not seeing the incentive here. I note that the Brazilian factory is still owned by Foxconn, so it's not like they're changing manufacturers. I'd expect Foxconn would manufacture them wherever they could build them the cheapest. What advantage does Brazil offer? Still not seeing it....

Produced by Brazillians. Is that bad? Because they are south of the equator, will the screws be threaded in reverse, Water spins in a toilet in reverse to North America, so the screws should be turned clockwise to unscrew.

Higher wages, but...Shorter shipping distanceLess product in the middle of the oceanPossibly more favorable tariffsLess bad press about working conditions and employees committing suicide?If they weren't keeping the same supplier I'd say possibly better new product security.

Or simple marketing. Being able to say your product is not manufactured in China is probably worth something these days, rightly or wrongly. There's also a possibility of environmental concerns. Though I admit ignorance as to whether Brazil is actually better in that area, China has quite a rep for pollution. Apple gets a well deserved bad rep for a lot of things, but I think they do legitimately care about the environment to some extent and, again, environmentally friendly is also good for marketing.

Because nobody else in south America would like an iPad, that fad is strong around here and almost every country have trade agreements with Brazil.

China > USA > $countryBrazil > $country

Also south America seems like the only continent thats not having financial problems at the scale of those in USA and EU. Probably the product curve [wikipedia.org] reached the top in developing nations.

tl;dr: we milked people here first, now move on to milk anyone able to pay for our stuff there

Brazil has a problem with the large amount of regulations, but that can be managed. Regulations are always worse for small companies, for a large corporation like Apple the cost of the legal team to handle that is proportionally less, there's an economy of scale in paperwork.

The advantage in Brazil today is the stable political system. Being governed by a leftist political party that has a center-right economic policy is a great advantage. The hard lessons of the hyperinflation of the 1980s taught Brazilian

Yes, Brazil does have a lot going for it. I have been impressed with the way it has been growing for the past 10 years. Lula got a lot of things right. However, manufacturing has been lagging.

That being said, no, having good business plan is not sufficient. If regulations add 5% to 10% (to pull a number out of thin air) to a product and there are other countries that have political stability and lower regulations. It’s hard to make a business case when you are fighting an uphill battle. One has to hav

It'd be interesting to know what those reasons are - I'm still not seeing the incentive here. I note that the Brazilian factory is still owned by Foxconn, so it's not like they're changing manufacturers. I'd expect Foxconn would manufacture them wherever they could build them the cheapest. What advantage does Brazil offer? Still not seeing it....

Well, the Foxconn factory is within the Free Economic Zone of Manaus [wikipedia.org]. The Brazilian government offers various significant tax incentives/exemptions to industries there. Those incentives, coupled with location advantages just might make up for the increase in wages as compared to China, although I don't know enough about it to state that this is a fact.

AFAIK, the Foxconn factory is in Jundiaí, near São Paulo. That's almost as far away from Manaus as possible in Brazil. However, the São Paulo state government is pretty aggressive in cutting taxes for big industrial complexes implemented onstate; that helps increase the state's industry and employment levels. Quite sure Foxconn got some very nice incentives for this factory.

I stand corrected. I saw this article [itdecs.com] which mentions they also have factories in Manaus, but it does appear you're correct, and the Jundiai one is where the bulk of the operation takes place.

They may have made some kind of arrangement with the government. I live in Argentina and the gvmnt stopped the import for most of Apple products, this may include even the iPhone 5, because of the opening of a Samsung assembly plant, according to the rumors. I don't think the idea of an arrangement of that kind in Brazil to be too weird.

Can the government stop the import of certain brand just because the competition is moving in? is that legal? Obviously Samsung leveraged or bribed to get that but how do Argentinian government justify such movement? It was my understanding that Argentinians love Apple.

Can the government stop the import of certain brand just because the competition is moving in?

Apple and Samsung are currently in a patent war. Apple gets Samsung products pulled in one country for patent violations, Samsung follows up by filing a patent suit in another country looking to ban the iPhone5 and iPad. And they jump around the globe hoping to beat their competitor into submission with various legal systems. I don't know if Argentina is one of those countries, but it's possible. As a governmen

The current government is trying to convert the country from a raw materials + agricultural country to an industrialized country. So far, they haven't succeeded. The current workforce is a mess - strikes every day, protests, and other annoyances are commonplace. Out of control inflation (a judge recently ordered to investigate journalists "asking private consultants about inflation". It's currently illegal to publish an inflationary index other than the official. Consulting companies doing so face fines ove

it's most likely due to the changes in china. the media spotlight of what happened in the foxconn plant in china probably has put just enough pressure there to put in place even some vapor like protections. so china does not get labeled(and rightly it should get labeled) as a place where companies push workers to suicide just for lower manufacturing costs. and so the multi-national company foxconn moves production to another country with very lax, to no worker rights because god forbid their executives and

Actually there is the Mercosul/Mercosur, which consists of only 5 countries, Brazil and Argentina are the biggest economies in South America are in it.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercosur [wikipedia.org]

But anyway, manufactoring in Brazil is a lot more expensive than in China.

From the grandparent: I think anything made in each of the american continents can be sold tariff free here

Regardless of where 'here' refers to, the GP is wrong. And by referring to 'each of the American continents' (namely North, Central and South Americas) he/she could only be talking about ALCA. The Mercosur treaty, as you said, consists only of a few countries, and the name of the treaty itself is a contraption that means 'market of the south'.

Because if we bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, it decreases the leverage that corporations have when extorting government benefits. Plus it might lead to the unfortunate situation where poor people can afford to live without having to beg for scraps.

Because if we bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, it decreases the leverage that corporations have when extorting government benefits.

If the iPad/iPhone was assembled in the US, it would be done with robots, not people (Foxconn has gone on record regarding this). It is too expensive to pay people to do simple things in the US, it only makes sense to pay engineers here.

By the way, the US is now at its all-time high level of manufacturing output. With very few workers.

Hi all.
Brazil is closer to the USA than China, and our senators approved a new law that Tablets will have discount on taxes, now it will be better to make it in Brazil than China.
Our market is in expansion and we have more and more users buying Table as it first computers.
Bye

Aloizio appears to be the Portuguese counterpart to Latin Aloysius, the little-known given name of a famous fictional mammoth [wikipedia.org], and its German counterpart is Alois, as in Adolf Hitler's father [wikipedia.org]. (Godwin!) I'm not familiar with Brazilian politics (it takes a brazillion brain cells just to keep up with the politics of my own country), but I could see "Aolizio" as an attempt to put down Mercadante by tying him to some undesirable aspect of AOL.

China = A hoarde of communist slaves working away in terrible conditions with one aim: World domination for the Chinese Communist Party and its authoritarian ways. Terrible human rights situation, censorship, people generally not allowed to do as they please by the government, most companies actually owned by the CCP, corruption, most of the women are either bitches or brainwashed into doing all they can to help Hu Jintao

Brazil = Party all the time, hawt women everywhere, everybody is too busy having fu

Brazil = Party all the time, hawt women everywhere, everybody is too busy having fun and consuming liquids with a high concentration of ethanol to be too serious about such evil things as world domination, a generally happy and stress-free bunch of lads.

True, it's party all the time over here, so we don't have to worry about corruption in government, high unemployment, high crime rate, high taxes, violence, crap public health and education systems, high taxes, crazy ass traffic, and other shit (besides high taxes) that leave this country economically far behind the other BRICs.

The truly sad part is that a brazilian-made iPad won't be any cheaper than the imported model we currently have. Brazilias usually spend the most on gadgets compared to other nations, due to... you guessed it, high taxes. Even if we have it our way, Apple will get greedy and charge whatever the market will bear (i.e. possiby lower taxes becomes Apple's margin).

I have also lived in both countries and can attest that Brasil has a much higher concentration of hot women than the USA does - speaking in general

I have no problem believing this, the difference between our populations is obvious (2010 Int. Obesity Taskforce [allcountries.org]). Note that the rates aren't directly comparable, as Brasil also has a more youthful population distribution which skews obesity numbers -- but I suppose that plays into the "hotness" distribution too:Obesity Rates:Brazil: M 8.9% | F 13.1%USA: M 32.3% | F 35.5%

"Nations have passed away and left no trace,and history gives the naked cause of it--one single, simple reason in all cases;they fell because their people were not fit."
-- Rudyard Kipling

I wish really that the jobs could be kept in the US because all this outsourcing has brought quite a lot of poverty to the place and the real cost is in the resulting unemployable underclass the US now has to support.

Well, that's what you get when you keep demanding lower prices.

Americans can be quite organized when they want. They have campaigned and blocked trade of various products in the past, by simply refusing to buy them (wasn't there something about tuna ? They refused to buy it until they started u

The whole world it's full of such craziness/weird/decadent/mindfuckstuff that you mention, is not specific to Brazil only. Anyway foreigners should not worry if they stick to the plan and don't stray to a bad neighborhood or trust a random friendly guy, same shit that you should do when you travel to a developed nation from South America.

Probably the only nations where you can walk freely are Canada and those super friendly Nordic countries, that is if you're white and don't get yourself in the middle of a

This may just be Hon Hai deciding to move some production capacity. Hon Hai makes the products, remember. Apple is a "hollowed out" company, with no manufacturing capability.

Historically, that's the beginning of the end.
The day may come when Apple is just a brand name licensed to real manufacturers. That's what Westinghouse [wikipedia.org] and RCA [wikipedia.org], once major companies, are now.

There are companies that don't manufacture, but still do real work. nVidia is a great example. They don't fab their chips, TSMC does. They also don't build the cards (other than reference boards for OEMs to look at) OEM partners like eVGA do. However they make a lot of money and it isn't off of patent trolling or something. What they do is design the chips. They have shitloads of R&D and simulation and so on and their engineers design the chips, write the drivers, and so on. That they don't own the facilities to make them is of no real consequence. It isn't like someone else could just up and make a graphics chip with no effort. The R&D is as hard or harder than the manufacturing.

Not saying that is quite the same for Apple, just saying that you don't have to be a manufacturer to be doing something worthwhile.

A good example is grocery stores. How many grocery stores do any food production? As far as I know, none. Some might have a bakery on site but they are still getting the parts from some other manufacturer. Grocery stores are definitely doing real work, and something worthwhile.

Grocery stores generally don't sell meals, though, they sell ingredients for meals. In this way, they're kind of like a parts retailer, not like Apple.

The food equivalent of Apple would be something like TGIFriday's ("Flinger's") -- they really aren't anything more than a brand. They sell complete meals supplied to them by food service vendors; the only thing they provide is the branding.

If you have production and want to have design, what do you do? Hire engineers, it costs something in the order of $100 k in tuitions to create a new engineer, there are thousands of engineers graduating every year all over the world.

If you have design and want to have production, what do you do? Building a new factory costs on the order of $1 billion, that's four orders of magnitude more than educating someone to be an engineer.

Giving priority to design over manufacturing only works as long as there is exc

First, since you like talking capital outlay, look in to the equipment they have for their development. Thousands of high end servers, a massive Cadence simulator, high end test equipment, and so on.

Then look at their people. It isn't one guy. It isn't 10 guys, it is thousands. Those salaries start adding up.

You are talking a lot of equipment and a lot of people. It isn't one guy sitting with a desktop.

Finally, just have a look at others that have tried. The market is littered with those that just couldn't compete with nVidia and ATi. You have some like S3 and Matrox that couldn't keep up and so stopped trying, producing only low end ans specialty parts. You have others like 3dfx that did well, but then fell because they couldn't adapt fast enough. You have still others like Bitboys that never managed to launch a product.

Hell Intel even failed. They were trying to launch a dedicated GPU, the Larabee, and it ended up not working out and was canceled. This is from a company that designs processors, has done basic graphics, and fabs chips. They still couldn't compete.

What nVidia does is highly technical and very difficult. It isn't something you do by hiring an engineering grad and telling him "go to it." It is a massively expensive process.

This is an unstable situation, when development is following many dead ends.

Look at what happens when designs begin to stabilize. Intel lost the memory chip business decades ago, because they couldn't fabricate them cheaper than the Asians could.

In the CPU and GPU market perhaps the advantage American companies have is cultural, the Asians do not have the same experience in software development. Anyhow, companies like Intel and nVidia do a lot of research in production too, it's not as easy as telling a chi

There are lots of rumours of management at ATI trying to cut corners on individual chip development so that their chips come out cheaper but slower than nVidia. I don't know if this would acknowledge that they can't keep up, that the innovations are going to run out leading to easier designs or merely bad management opening the door for another newcomer.

So based on rumors, JP Morgan analysts lowered production forecasts which leads to speculation that iPad is moving production to Brazil. I don't know if I would place much stock in these analyst forecasts. They're almost never right. When the iPad 2 first came out some analysts forecasted really high numbers like 8M the first quarter only to downgrade them later. Their reasoning was since the iPad 1 sold about 7M the previous quarter, the iPad 2 should outsell it. Well the analysts did think that the previous quarter being the holidays or that it might take time to ramp up production for a new product were factors.

Right now it's only rumors that Apple has cut orders to their existing suppliers. It may not be true. Even if it were true, if Apple has done so to bring on more suppliers nothing says those new suppliers are Brazilian. It might be that Apple is simply bringing on other Asian suppliers. Some people are speculating that this means the iPad 3 will launch soon. I would think it is more likely that Apple has cut orders because they are about to launch the iPhone 5 (or whatever it is called) and the iPad 2 shares more of the same components with the iPhone 4.

So based on rumors, JP Morgan analysts lowered production forecasts which leads to speculation that iPad is moving production to Brazil. I don't know if I would place much stock in these analyst forecasts. They're almost never right. When the iPad 2 first came out some analysts forecasted really high numbers like 8M the first quarter only to downgrade them later.

Well, it depending on how you count, they were right. In FQ2011, the first the iPad 2 was available, they only sold about 2.5 million of them - in the 3 weeks from March 15th.

There is almost no way that Apple is cutting production. If anything Apple is going to have a tough time keeping up with demand this holiday season.

All the mindshare is on tablets right now. That does not mean that notebooks are dead but it does mean that the marginal consumer is breaking toward a tablet right now. Even the eee pad slider, which no one knows about, sold out at 2 of the 3 big retailers (B&H and Newegg) within just a few days of being released.

As an IT person who have worked to identify and block corporate espionage in the past here in Brazil, I would have to say that, even if it is a smaller problem than in China, it is still pretty big. But then again, isn't it everywhere ?

Brazil just reduced taxes for tablets produced within the country. Apple may or may not be moving its production to Brazil, but it is certainly interesting that this speculation come right after this Brazilian gov't move. Also, there is Mercosul, which is an area of (almost) free commerce in South America that has Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile as members (Venezuela is also part of Mercosul, I think).

"Insiders" don't have to make stupid guesses what this might mean. Insiders _know_ what Apple is doing. That's because they are inside, and that's why they are called "insiders".

The people making guesses about a production move to Brazil are either overpaid information whores who don't have a clue, or some random MacRumors poster, not having much more of a clue, but at least not pretending and getting paid for it.

Aolizio Mercadante, the Brazilian Minister of Science and Technology, confirmed to the press earlier this month that Foxconn’s Jundiaí, Brazil factory is ready to begin production

I would take that with a grain of salt. Mercadante and his political party have strong root and support from blue collar workers. Heck, their party name can be translated as "Workers Party". So this could be nothing more than a political move to increase his popularity with his support base.

How about the fucking radiation pouring out of Fukushima? Japan? It's a goner. It would be more merciful at this point if a giant earthquake or tsunami wiped out the whole continent. Less suffering, no horrible birth defects, no prolonged (or swift) and agonizing deaths due to radiation poisoning, no parents having to watch their kids die. Nuclear power? I call bullshit.

Additionally, the law for informatics (lei de informática) ensures huge tax cuts for companies investing money in R&D, and this could be almost anything related to HW or SW development. Add to that the fact that Brazilian products has easy access to all Latin American market and one will that this decision seems very rational and expe

Hon Hai/Foxconn, Apple's iPad manufactuer in China, is also setting up production in Brazil. It's nothing more than that. I wouldn't expect a Brazilian and Chinese iPad to be any different, except maybe in the bikini line.

Brazil provides huge tax breaks for products *assembled* in the country with local workforce, even if all the components are manufactred elsewhere. So the big manufacturers just import the component kits from China and assemble them here. This is true for Sony notebooks, the Xbox360 (recently started to be assembled here, and will start selling cheaper than the Wii for that alone), and the same goes for electronics such as phones, monitors, TVs, etc. Foxconn isn't starting up a facility out of nothing, the